Well, golly. I was gonna go and write a long entry on how observing the Universe probably won’t really change its lifespan, as breathlessly reported in a New Scientist article, but then Pamela went and did a fine job writing it up, so I’ll just let you go read her stuff.
I’ll add to her comments that this isn’t the first time New Scientist has exaggerated (to put it very kindly) the truth to make a splashy headline. I have friends who write for them, and I know that in general it’s a pretty good mag. But geez, they need to lighten up on the hyperbole. The last thing we need is to burn out potential audiences with over-the-top rhetoric like that, especially when it’s based on such marginal results.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Since the observer in QM is always assumed to be external to the system, I expect we have nothing to worry about, unless God is external, in which case, we shouldn’t be praying to it, because that might attract It’s attention/observation and then we’d all be dooooomed,,,,
Wh ha ha ha ha!!!
Gary 7
November 26th, 2007 at 10:21 am
>”But geez, they need to lighten up on the hyperbole. The last thing we need is to burn out potential audiences with over-the-top rhetoric…”
(massive spit take)
Yeah, the skeptical blogs never indulge in any of that!
And this comes from an uberskeptic!
November 26th, 2007 at 10:22 am
It is incredibly narcissistic to believe that humans, by the act of observing the universe, will destroy it. Usually such self-importance is assigned to realm of religion and/or science fiction (and sometimes those two are the same thing) and not the stuff of serious science interested in the truth without hype.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Pamela has raised an important philosophical question: which is worse, an early end to the universe, or the possibility that there’s a second OJ Simpson out there?
November 26th, 2007 at 10:52 am
When I read that NS article I was incredulous. And then I saw that the idea came from Lawrence Krauss, one of the biggest idiots on the planet, and my surprise withered away to nothing.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:53 am
We are all Doomed, I’m tellin’ Ya’ll we are DOOMED! WE WILL ALL DIE HORRIB…… Uh Oh, dinner time, gotta go.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:14 am
OK- but I’m going to blame the astronomers if clock hands start whizzing around and pages start flying off the calendars.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:26 am
> OK- but I’m going to blame the astronomers if clock hands start whizzing around and pages start flying off the calendars.
You can go do that; I’ll start looking for Rod Serling smoking a cigarette.
I read the “Oh noes we’sa gonna all die, Annie!” article and immediately thought: “if this were so, then all the possible space aliens out there would have made their possible observations, reset the universe, and killed us all already. However, we’ve not collapsed the aliens’ wave function yet; they’ve observed the universe and simultaneously have not observed the universe until we drop in on them and observe them observing the universe. At which point the universe resets and we’re all like ‘wtf hax.’”
Maybe that’s the solution to Fermi’s paradox: contact can’t be made or else the universe disappears in an Earth-shattering kaboom.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Everyone knows that in order to get an Earth-shattering Kaboom you need an illudium q-38 explosive space modulator! Where did I put mine? … It seems to be missing.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Think about it this way: known causes of Earth-shattering kabooms:
1) Illudium Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator (and a big gun)
2) Meeting yourself in the past
3) ?
I’ve just filled in #3. Meeting other intelligent life whose observations, combined with your own, destroy everything. Still, good catch.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
In the Universe, if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, it made a sound that no one heard. (In the past.)
If we brought that description from the zone of middle-dimensions down into the quantum level, then if someone (an observer) chopped down a tree in a forest but wasn’t there to chop it down, it would fall and would not fall unless they peeked at it. If it did fall, it would fall through the entire Earth and it would be both a single tree as well as every other tree in the forest.*
* On Wednesdays and Fridays.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
“The last thing we need is to burn out potential audiences with over-the-top rhetoric like that”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Watch out for those over-the-top posts!
November 26th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
> * On Wednesdays and Fridays.
Are we talking QM causality and decay or playing Fizzbin here?
November 26th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Way to go New Scientist. You just told the terrorists how they can DESTROY THE UNIVERSE! I think we should jail them for treason!
Now, to quote the Simpsons, “Let’s go burn down the observatory so this never happens again!”
Rob
November 26th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Well, the collapse of the wave function could be included by the time one has played two rounds of Fizzbin.
However, my reference was a reminder of a joke made by a mathematician named Norbert Wiener, who was describing physics in terms of his college teaching schedule:
“The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is neither, but is praying to his God that someone, preferably himself, will find the reconciliation between the two views.”
mention by one of the early QM pioneers who also taught university physics – a reference to things working in conjunction to class schedules.)
November 26th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
I stopped reading NS a few years ago for exactly this reason. Every time an article was published on a subject with which I was more than just passingly familiar I could spot flaws, if not gaping holes, that simply shouldn’t be in a professionally-edited magazine. If I can’t trust the articles I’m confident are wrong, how can I trust the articles where I’m a complete newbie?
November 26th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
I’ve heard more complaints about New Scientist than about any other science magazine, and from a wider variety of fields, too: astronomy, computer science, linguistics, medicine, physics. For my writeup of one such incident, with lots of sources cited, see here, and for an editor of New Scientist not caring, see here. (In the latter case, said editor dared me to write 2400 words of pop science that he could critique. I picked a topic and wrote about 1800 of those words before John Baez and Chris Hillman convinced me that it’d be a waste of my time: “No Man but a blockhead ever did anything involving being peppered with buckshot, except for money.” I’ll probably finish up that piece soon anyway; it’s on Jack Cowan’s theoretical neuroscience. I have written material aimed for high-school students, who might be a more sophisticated audience than the editorial teams of glossy magazines.)
November 26th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
moopet you are right. The last time I bought a copy was when an article reckoned that firing microwaves within a continer could make it move!!
November 26th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I remember when I first read about Boltzmann Brains in New Scientist, my first thought was, “This stuff is so weird and so utterly unbelievable even to an educated layman, it really needs to be taken with a large grain of salt…or is this just another Alan Sokal hoax?” A few months later, NS reported that some scientists were convinced that Botzmann Brains would be the predominant form of intelligence in most versions of the universe – and therefore may elbow aside our puny human intelligences!
Sadly, Alan Sokal’s object lesson in the gullibility of non-scientists when confronted with convincing-sounding gobbledygook spouted by a respected scientist has primarily had the effect of teaching non-scientists to disregard pretty much anything that scientists say that doesn’t conform to their own observations. While this may result in a healthy level of skepticism when faced with alarms of impending invasions of Bolzmann Brains or universes condemned to death by scientists who dared to peer into the Great Unknown, it’s also resulted in a general distrust of any statements that require much more than a high school education.
November 26th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
I read that story when it came out. I thought it was a great example of someone – doesn’t matter who – thinking about the Heisenberg principle and applying it to everything under the Sun. I thought New Scientist was supposed to be a pretty good magazine – maybe even something like the old Scientific American.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Since you posted something from somethingaweful.com a little bit ago did you see the magazine send up they did in the photoshop Friday?
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/magazine-mayhem3-2.php
November 27th, 2007 at 6:40 am
Argh. I wish people would learn that “observer” in QM is shorthand for “putting it in a situation in which it /could be/ observed”. It doesn’t matter if a living mind sees the results.
Anyway, it’s not like anything other than individual particles are ever in a real, interfere-able quantum state. By definition, every atom of a body is being “observed” by its neighboring atoms. We can write the waveform for the possibilities of a living or dead cat, but that doesn’t change the reality of what’s in the box; it’s just a representation of our (lack of) knowledge. The cat will still start to meow or stink at some point.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:32 am
How sad. There was an asteroid that just missed us, then a neighboring star failed to become supernova, there’s a behind schedule big meteorite, and now we have this issue. As proved: we will go extinct rather soon!
(I didn’t suggest that non-astronomers have less dooms-day prophets, but astronomers are/were prized by laymen for accurate calculations:))
Iant